6 Jan 2018

New light on Native American origins

From Up This Way, 8:20 am on 6 January 2018
Carl Zimmer.

Carl Zimmer. Photo: BDEngler

An 11,000-year-old skeleton of two children, unearthed in Alaska, is yet another part of the story of where Native Americans come form.

The baby girl's bones have helped clear a few things up thanks to a simple genome, which suggests there was a now-lost population during the last ice age, related to the ancestors of today's Native Americans.

Science writer and author Carl Zimmer tell Simon Morton it's been a long process figuring out what this new data meant.